RHS: Retired Husband Syndrome—and You Thought We Had a Diagosis for Every Peeve in America. Ha! Ya' Goose!

Sakura Terakawa, 63, describes her four decades of married life in a small urban apartment as a gradual transition from wife to mother to servant. Communication with her husband started with love letters and wooing words under pink cherry blossoms. It devolved over time, she said, into mostly demands for his evening meals and nitpicking over the quality of her housework.

So when he came home one afternoon three years ago, beaming, and announced he was ready to retire, Terakawa despaired.

“This is it,” I remember thinking. “I am going to have to divorce him now,” Terakawa recalled.

Then, she realized killing him, burning his remains in the basement incinerator, and telling everyone he'd run off to America with his whore of a girlfriend and died would be much easier.